Après
September 6–18, 2017
Centre Pompidou, Paris
“There is, there always has been, an urgent need to question spirals of violence and counter-violence. But questioning violence does not mean explaining it, it means questioning ourselves in the face of it. Après [After] is a project on the present time. A time experienced as a constant entanglement of afters: after the event, after the disaster, after the upheaval of certainties.”
Following studies in political science, Éric Baudelaire turned to art as a means of expressing a critical view of the world, through film, photography, performative installations and texts. His works probe a reality shaped by the systems of representation that structure contemporary societies: legal, political, economic and information systems. It scrutinises that which does not comply with these systems – whatever goes off-track, capsizes or wanders off-site. Artistic activity becomes an incursion into the flipside of History and the thwarted plans of the political machine. Initiated in the aftermath of the Paris attacks of November 13th 2015, Éric Baudelaire’s project questions the means and the ends of art, from within a museum, in the present time.
For a brief period of two weeks, Après brings together an exhibition and a daily programme of encounters. Éric Baudelaire’s latest film, Also Known as Jihadi (2017), is central to this proposition. It follows the journey of Aziz from his native Vitry-sur-Seine to the criminal courthouse, and focuses on a reality that goes beyond individual events: a reality saturated by interpretations, but whose complexity defies comprehension. In the exhibition space, the works of other artists from the past and present respond to the film. Every day, at 7 p.m., a public programme of screenings and discussions with the public will take place. Far from the media frenzy, one question underlies this encounter of works and words: what can art do? The artist approaches the question through an intuitive list of twelve words, which unfold alphabetically in the exhibition space, and serve as a guideline for twelve days of exchange • Marcella Lista, curator
Five daily screenings of Also Known As Jihadi
A selection of works and documents from the Centre Pompidou collections,
A journal, which served as the score for the exhibition, organised around a list of words and corresponding letters (A for Architecture, C for Commemoration, H for Hypnosis, R for Reckoning, T for running out of Time…)︎︎︎
A series of 12 corresponding public programs,
Each public program was transcribed in a series of 12 posters that were designed and silkscreened overnight and presented in the exhibition space the following day •
Après was reactivated in Faire avec at the CRAC Occitanie in 2019
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